DECS writes: Palm Pre users have been hit by a new cloud sync failure resulting in lost contacts, calendar items, notes and tasks, which now means that virtually every major smartphone vendor has suffered significant cloud problems: Apple's MobileMe last year, Nokia's Ovi and Microsoft's Danger/Sidekick this year, and additional rolling outages suffered by BlackBerry and Google users. Will vendors dial back cloud-only sync, or at least begin providing more robust local sync and restore features along the lines of the iPhone's iTunes sync? Windows Mobile and Android are still pursuing designs that, like the Pre, expected users to fully rely on central cloud servers rather than defaulting to a local backup option.